荒诞者共和

RICHARD WALKER & DANIEL BUCK
New Left Review 46
July-August 2007

The PRC’s breakneck transition to capitalism seen through the prism of 19th-century Europe and America, as its cities rehearse the processes analysed by Marx: commodification of land and labour, formation of markets and capitalist elites. What lessons might the West’s past hold for China’s future?

Cities in the Transition to Capitalism

Modern China is undergoing a relentless process of transformation, from the forests of construction cranes in its coastal cities to the gargantuan infrastructure projects in its interior. Its economic trajectory has been equally dramatic: China is now ranked 4th in the world by gdp, rising from 11th in 1990. A range of developments testify to its rapid progress along the path to a capitalist economy: the commodification of land and labour, emergence of private firms, formation of finance capital, among many others. [1] Yet China scholars have been curiously reluctant to apply the classic Marxist idea of a transition to capitalism—and its corollary, primitive accumulation—to the Chinese case. Instead, they quite loosely use terms such as globalization, marketization, post-socialism, reform era and market socialism, seemingly unaware of how closely the transformations under way in China compare with the development of capitalism in Europe and North America—not to mention many other ‘late developers’ in Asia and Latin America.

Comparison with historical experience of the rise of capitalism in the West can act as a useful counterbalance to three shortcomings of contemporary China studies. The first common error is to exaggerate China’s uniqueness vis-à-vis the general process of capitalist transition. This does not mean adopting the flat-earth neoliberalism of Thomas Friedman or a unilinear Marxism in which the rest of the world must recapitulate the economic history of Britain or the United States. While capitalism has universal elements, the road to capitalism follows many routes, depending on history, geographic circumstance and politics. Like a virus, capitalism cannot survive without living hosts, whose dna it alters in order to reproduce. Therefore, one can certainly refer to ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’.

A second pitfall for China watchers is an obsession with the socialist past. Certainly, the Maoist era shaped the country’s present course to an important degree, and China shares characteristics with other ex-socialist countries. But it differs profoundly from most post-Soviet and East European countries in that it did not undergo a sudden implosion of state, party and economy. Instead, an autocratic state has maintained a close hold on economic policy and the Communist Party continues to monopolize political life. Nonetheless, China in the twenty-first century can no longer sensibly be called ‘late’ or ‘market’ socialist.

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Christopher J Forster
Foreign Policy Centre

Preface by Lord Charles Powell of Bayswater,
President of the China Britain Business Council

The Wall Street Journal reported recently how foreign-invested R&D centres in China have almost quadrupled to 750 over the last four years. The Foreign Policy Centre report bears this out with statistics showing that China is now ranked third in the world for total R&D spending. It estimates that by 2010 China will have the same number of science and engineering graduates as the United States. The idea that China is a sweat-shop economy is very dated. Instead it is a growing challenge to the previously comfortable technological lead of the Western countries.

Nevertheless, while China is focussed on closing the \'innovation gap\', it still has some way to go. The Foreign Policy Centre\'s calculations show that China is a technologically hungry nation; good at development and adaptation of technology but not necessarily yet successful at independent innovation. The Chinese leadership is determined to change this. It places growing emphasis on the concept of \'made by China\' rather than \'made in China\'. As President Hu Jintao is reported to have said \'borrowing and importing can never replace innovation\'. The recent 2006 session of China\'s National Peoples Congress has confirmed the high priority which China plans to give R&D. The Foreign Policy Centre goes further and demonstrates that most R&D spending in China has been the result of state-directed and funded initiatives undertaken for strategic, security or nationalistic reasons – a vivid illustration of the importance placed by China on the link between science and its growing global power.

Other important factors rightly highlighted by this Report include the priority which China now places on extending its capacity in scientific education and training, and the growing emphasis which China is now placing on encouraging private sector investments in R&D. The Report\'s findings show that domestic Chinese firms are increasingly more efficient, innovative and profitable than foreign high-tech R&D firms investing in mainland China. This is driven by their greater hunger for commercial success. But such success needs the foundation of universities and other educational establishments which encourage creative, innovative and commercially minded scientists. This is an environment which has yet to mature in China.

A substantial underlying issue vital to the role which R&D is to play in China\'s economic development is the question of Intellectual Property Protection. China has well documented regulations for the protection of IP. The problem is lack of enforcement. As China itself develops more domestic innovations, the hope must be that enforcing the protection of IP will be in the interest not just of foreigners but of an increasing number of local companies. If China aspires to be a leading global power in the field of science and technological innovation, it needs international collaboration with more and more global companies undertaking research activities in China. This can only be achieved if it cleans up its act on protection of IP.

The Report\'s author, Christopher Forster, and the Foreign Policy Centre are also to be congratulated on their timing in producing this Report just as the United Kingdom is seeking to increase efforts to attract more Chinese investment to the United Kingdom and, particularly to encourage Chinese companies to base their overseas R&D centres in the UK. Britain needs to show imagination and inventiveness, for instance in fostering partnerships between UK and Chinese academic institutions and businesses. This is the reason why the China-Britain Business Council has set up an Innovation and Technology Forum to increase UK commercial R&D partnerships with Chinese counterparts. The Foreign Policy Centre\'s excellent Report supports our belief that Britain must repeat with China its earlier success in attracting to the UK the bulk of Asian investment by other Asian countries in the EU. That is the best way for both countries to maximise the opportunities for a strong science and technology partnership.

Download China\'s Secret Weapon (320 kilobyte PDF)

Charles Taylor
Department of Philosophy
Baylor University
Boston Review, Oct/Nov 1994
Vol. XIX No. 5

This essay is a response to Martha Nussbaum's "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism" which appeared in the Boston Review (Vol. 19, No. 5)

I agree with so much in Martha Nussbaum's well-argued and moving piece, but I would like to enter one caveat. Nussbaum sometimes seems to be proposing cosmopolitan identity as an alternative to patriotism. If so, then I think this is a mistake. And that is because we cannot do without patriotism in the modern world.

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New Regulations Spawn Fears of Economic Nationalism
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
The Washington Post, Foreign Service
February 2, 2007

SHANGHAI -- "I know you don't know that you don't know."

Those insulting words, thrown out by a Chinese man to a Westerner, are the punchline of an Internet commercial that ends with a beautiful Chinese bride jilting her confused Western fiance for the Chinese hero.

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Christopher R Hughes
Open Democracy
18-4-2006

China’s much-vaunted “peaceful rise” is shadowed by a resurgent nationalism that has become a key factor in the ruling party’s political calculations, says Christopher R. Hughes.

China is now accepted as a major force in the world’s economic and security systems, having joined the World Trade Organisation and aligned itself with the United States in the “war on terror”. And with the 2008 Olympic Games awarded to Beijing, the country is also on its way to establishing a newly respectable cultural status. Yet incidents such as the anti-Japanese protests which rocked Shanghai in spring 2005 (after Tokyo approved new school textbooks that the Chinese say played down Japan’s wartime atrocities) still raise questions about the kind of society China is becoming. How the rise of popular nationalism might influence its foreign policy is an issue of particular concern.

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